If you’ve spent any time on social media recently, you may have seen a screenshot that seems, at first glance, damning: a private text from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top infectious disease expert in the United States, in which he muses that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy could “theoretically” be associated with miscarriage. The posts, amplified by conservative politicians and influencers, say Fauci privately knew the vaccines were causing miscarriages at an astonishing rate—82 percent—and pushed them on pregnant people anyway. “Dr. Fauci publicly BOASTED that tens of thousands of pregnant women took the COVID vaccine, with ‘no red flags,’” one viral post claims. “Privately, he knew it was likely causing MISCARRIAGES. PRISON!!!!” It’s a gut-wrenching accusation, especially for anyone who is pregnant, trying to conceive, or has a loved one in that situation. But once you look at the full context—not just the screenshot but the entire conversation, the state of knowledge at the time, and the mountains of research that have accumulated since—the story falls apart. What the text messages actually show is a scientist doing what scientists are supposed to do: acknowledging an early, unproven hypothesis and calling for monitoring, not confessing to hidden knowledge of a known harm.
The text messages were released by Republican Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, who obtained pages from Fauci’s government-issued phone and diary as part of a wider investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and Fauci’s role in the pandemic response. The specific exchange that has gone viral is from January 2021, a time when COVID-19 vaccines had just become available to high-priority groups, including health care workers and long-term care residents. Pregnant people had not been included in the initial clinical trials for the Pfizer and Moderna shots, which meant there was a real gap in data. In the text chain, Fauci writes to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky: “Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.” Reading that in 2026, after years of misinformation, it’s easy to see why it might alarm people. But the key word is “theoretically.” Fauci was raising a plausible biological mechanism—high fever in early pregnancy is something doctors have long taken seriously—and suggesting it was worth watching. He was not saying it was happening. In fact, in the very same text chain, just a day later, he noted that more than 10,000 pregnant people had already received the vaccine with “no issues” and that animal toxicology studies had not raised any “red flags.” That’s not a confession; that’s an evidence-based expert saying: we don’t have all the answers yet, but the early signals look reassuring, and we should keep collecting data.
To understand why that nuance matters, it helps to remember what pregnancy vaccine research looked like in early 2021. Historically, pregnant people have been excluded from initial safety trials for new drugs and vaccines, largely out of caution about harming a fetus. That means whenever a new vaccine or medication is introduced, there is always a period of uncertainty about how it will affect pregnant people. That was true for the COVID-19 shots. It wasn’t a secret conspiracy to put pregnant people at risk; it was a standard, if frustrating, limitation of medical research. In the absence of trial data, public health officials had to rely on “real-world evidence”—the experiences of people who chose to get vaccinated as the shots rolled out. That is exactly what Fauci and his colleagues were discussing. They weren’t hiding a known risk; they were identifying a theoretical concern and tracking it in real time. As more pregnant people were vaccinated, the data came in. And it was remarkably consistent: the vaccines did not increase the risk of miscarriage. A 2023 study of pregnancies in the United States and Canada found that COVID-19 vaccination, whether in one partner or both, before conception was not associated with a higher rate of miscarriage. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis, covering 177 studies and more than 630,000 pregnant individuals, found no safety concerns linked to COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to recommend that all pregnant and lactating people receive an updated COVID-19 vaccine. The CDC’s website, despite recent controversial changes to vaccine recommendations under former Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., still states that “studies have shown no increased risk for complications like miscarriage, preterm delivery, stillbirth, or birth defects.”
So where does the 82 percent figure come from? It’s an antivaccine myth that has been circulating since 2021, and it keeps getting recycled because it sounds terrifying. The number traces back to a submission to the Senate by James Thorp, a gynecologist who has a long history of spreading falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines. Thorp’s submission cited a real study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2021, that looked at pregnant participants enrolled in the V-safe registry, a CDC surveillance system. That study reported a pregnancy loss rate of about 12.6 percent among vaccinated pregnant people. That is well within the normal baseline for miscarriages in the general population, which is estimated at 15 to 20 percent of recognized pregnancies, with most happening in the first trimester. The 82 percent figure was never in the paper. It came from a flawed calculation that arbitrarily excluded from the denominator anyone who was still pregnant or who had received the vaccine in the third trimester. In other words, the people who hadn’t yet had a chance to miscarry—or who were vaccinated later in pregnancy—were simply removed from the equation. That inflates the percentage enormously and misrepresents the actual risk. The study’s authors later released updated data in September 2021, again confirming that the miscarriage rate among vaccinated people was consistent with what had been observed before the pandemic. If 82 percent of vaccinated pregnant people had truly lost their pregnancies, we would have seen a catastrophic, unmistakable drop in live births across the country. We didn’t. Population data from the U.S. and around the world show nothing even close to that.
Another crucial piece of context is that when it comes to pregnancy complications, the greatest risk is not the vaccine—it’s the virus itself. COVID-19 infection during pregnancy is dangerous. The Mayo Clinic notes that pregnancy raises the risk of severe COVID-19, and the World Health Organization points out that COVID-19 infection during pregnancy increases the likelihood of preterm birth. Severe illness from COVID-19 can lead to hospitalization, intensive care, and the need for mechanical ventilation, all of which are riskier for both the pregnant person and the fetus. The vaccines were developed precisely to prevent that kind of harm. They dramatically reduce the risk of severe disease, hospitalization, and death. So when the same people who say pregnant people shouldn’t get vaccinated also downplay the risks of COVID-19, they are offering a deadly tradeoff. The evidence is not complicated: the shots are safe during pregnancy, they are effective at preventing severe disease, and getting sick with COVID-19 while pregnant is far riskier than getting the vaccine. This isn’t a matter of faith in Fauci or any single public figure. It’s a matter of looking at years of data from hundreds of thousands of pregnancies, peer-reviewed studies, and the recommendations of major medical organizations. The idea that Fauci or anyone else knowingly pushed a vaccine that caused 82 percent of pregnant recipients to miscarry is not just false; it’s demonstrably absurd.
So why does this myth keep coming back? Because a private text message feels like a smoking gun. It feels intimate and honest in a way that press conferences and public guidelines do not. And in an era of deep distrust in institutions, people are primed to believe that officials were lying to them. But the truth is that public health decisions are made with imperfect information, especially during a pandemic that was expanding faster than scientists could gather data. Early on, the uncertainty was real. Nobody knew exactly how pregnant people would respond to the vaccine. That’s why officials like Fauci, Murthy, and Walensky were talking privately. They were trying to weigh a theoretical risk against the very real, documented risk of COVID-19 during pregnancy. As the evidence evolved, they updated their guidance—not because they were hiding a secret, but because that’s how science works. The same is true for you or me. If you’re pregnant or planning to become pregnant, it’s completely normal to feel anxious about what you put into your body. But the most reliable information available—from independent researchers, from obstetricians’ groups, from government surveillance systems—all points in the same direction. COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy is safe, and it protects both you and your baby from a virus that is far more dangerous. The next time a screenshot crosses your feed claiming some hidden truth, ask for the full conversation. Ask for the study. Ask for the context. In this case, the facts are on the side of reassurance, not fear.